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Education reform came in with good intentions a few years ago to try and re-ignite an education system that in many ways had become complacent and institutionally entrenched.

Some of the reforms such as formalizing annual teacher and administrator evaluation have been somewhat productive. Who can argue against one being evaluated with rigor on an annual basis? But embedded in the attempt to bring rigor to evaluation was a misguided use of student standardized test scores within the teacher evaluation. On the surface this may seem to some as a necessary component, but when one looks deeper they will find the inherent unfairness and lack of necessity of such an approach.

The use of test scores for teacher evaluation requires an unusual amount of student testing. One can postulate that one of the primary reasons for increased student testing is so that we have enough test data to evaluate teachers. This seems to be an inappropriate use of student time and intellectual property.

Even when doing the best job possible in the classroom, teachers find themselves paying an evaluation price for things out of their control, such as parental involvement or lack thereof in a child’s education. When one considers that a student spends a minimal amount of the minutes of their lives through age 18 actually attending school (perhaps no more than 10 percent), how can it be fair that student standardized test outcomes be attached to teacher evaluation and therefore teacher reputation and compensation?

Having timely results of test scores has always been a hallmark of best practice in education. Providing quick feedback to students furthers their learning. Unfortunately, Indiana has had a history of tardiness in reporting student standardized test scores.

This year is not the first year schools have waited for test scores, but certainly this year is the longest wait most can remember. How can student tests taken in March and results not reported until November provide an effective set of data points for teacher effectiveness much less student learning?

If one of the goals of using test scores to assign teacher effectiveness ratings was to reward great teachers, help struggling teachers become better at their craft and poor teachers encouraged to find a new profession, then the timing of the test results is a disaster and a failure. The goal is certainly not being met.

Some would argue that test scores must be embedded in teacher evaluations because what gets monitored gets done. Do teachers, whose entire professional lives literally are spent under public scrutiny, need student standardized test scores to prove their value? Hardly. Rigorous evaluations of daily teacher classroom practice and teacher engagement in the school by trained administrators are in place and are being implemented with fidelity.

Without standardized test scores, effective teachers can still be rewarded for their efforts, marginal teachers can still be helped to improve and ineffective teachers can still be encouraged to leave the field. Test scores are not needed for this purpose. These actions can be easily achieved through the use of the multiple observations that are part of the current evaluation system.

It is past time to relieve students from the burden of a high-stakes test for the purpose of teacher evaluation. Let’s implement, on a broader scale, the use of authentic classroom assessments that provide evidence of what a student has learned through outcome embedded projects or demonstrations.

Teachers throughout the Lafayette School Corp. have, for years, been implementing authentic assessments in their classes. Among the many authentic assessments being utilized are senior English capstone projects, research entrenched science projects, stock market game projects in economics classes, capstone labs in chemistry classes, Project Citizen in social studies classes, Purdue GK-12 projects in math classes, engineering by design projects in intermediate school STEM classes, conversational demonstrations in foreign language classes and the creation of plastic molds from computer assisted designs in engineering classes.

These are just a few of the many types of authentic assessments being used routinely. Ask yourself what the most meaningful learning experience was that you can remember from your days in school. Was it the standardized test you took or the project you did, the speech you gave or the demonstration you presented?

It’s time for this country to abandon the failed attempt of implementing annual standardized tests to determine student, teacher and school effectiveness and instead implement short bursts of periodic assessments to measure real student growth and follow the lead of exemplary teachers in implementing meaningful, authentic assessments of student learning.